4 Architectural Design Urban Flashes Asia 4Guest-edited by Nicholas Boyarsky and Peter Lang Wiley Academy Logo 4 8 Architectural Design ISBN 0-470848746-6 Vol 73 No 5 September/October 2003 Profile No 164 16 Editorial Offices Abbreviated positions International House b=bottom, c=centre, l=left, r=right Ealing Broadway Centre London W5 5DB T: +44 (0)20 8326 3800 22 F: +44 (0)20 8326 3801 E: [email protected] Editor Helen Castle Production 28 Mariangela Palazzi-Williams Art Director 4 Editorial Helen Castle Christian Küsters ◊CHK Design 5 Introduction: Dirty Cities Nicholas Boyarsky Designer Scott Bradley ◊CHK Design 8 Chinatown is Everywhere Peter Lang Project Coordinator 16 Introduction to Micro-Urbanism Ti-Nan Chi Caroline Ellerby 38 Picture Editor 22 Way of Display: Urban Tactics in the Context of the Betel Nut Culture in Taiwan Karl-Heinz Klopf Famida Rasheed 28 Anarchy and Beyond: An Interview with Kazuo Shinohara Hirohisa Hemmi Advertisement Sales 01243 843272 38 What is Made in Tokyo? Yoshiharu Tsukamoto Editorial Board 54 48 Hyper Complex Living Nobuyaki Furuya Denise Bratton, Adriaan Beukers, André Chaszar, Peter Cook, 54 Gaikoku Mura: Japanese Foreign Country Villages Sue Barr Max Fordham, Massimiliano 58 In the Age of Indeterminacy: Towards a Non-Visual Pragmatism Gary Chang Fuksas, Edwin Heathcote, Anthony Hunt, Charles Jencks, 68 Pearl River Delta: Lean Planning, Thin Patterns Laurent Gutierrez and Valérie Portefaix Jan Kaplicky, Robert Maxwell, 58 Jayne Merkel, Monica Pidgeon, 78 Bangkok: Liquid Perception Brian McGrath Antoine Predock, Leon van Schaik 86 Reconstruction Solidarity: The Thao Tribe Nicholas Boyarsky Contributing Editors 90 Action (Verb) Taipei Sand Helsel André Chaszar Craig Kellogg 96 92 Modern Heritage: A Terrain of the Question Guyon Chung Jeremy Melvin 96 Hanoi Justine Graham Jayne Merkel 98 Contributor Biographies 100+ Published in Great Britain in 2002 by Wiley- Subscription Offices UK Single Issues UK: £22.50 Academy, a division of John Wiley & Sons Ltd John Wiley & Sons Ltd. 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Avenue, Elmont, NY 11003 125+ 125+ Site Lines Gooderham and Wort’s Distillery, Toronto, Canada Sean Stanwick 2 3 Introduction Introduction Editorial The greatest achievement of Nicholas Boyarsky and Peter Lang in guest-editing this title of 1 has been bringing to the fore Urban Flashes, an active informal network of practising Asian architects that was founded by Ti-Nan Chi in 1999. This issue does not pertain to be a full account Helen Castle of urban thinking in Asia, but rather an alternative one. As Boyarsky so clearly states in his introductory essay, Nicholas Boyarsky the predominant modes of considering urban Asia in the West have in recent years been largely confined to corporate practice, which has regarded it as a remarkable commercial opening, and academia, which has perceived it – at arm’s length – as a depersonalised ‘phenomena’. Thus the immense need to express the almost infinite range of alternatives and diversities within Asian culture that Urban Flashes Asia so eloquently signifies but in no way attempts to circumscribe. In his own introductory essay ‘Chinatown is Everywhere’, Peter Lang further flips these notions aside by presenting urban Asia not as a geographically removed continent but as a constant presence through the Asian communities integrated within all the major towns and cities in the West. It is, however, the fascination of the Urban Flashes Group with the ephemerality of the Asian city that makes it Almost all of Tokyo’s buildings have been ‘Urban Flashes Asia’ charts a paradigm shift in Asian constructed within the last 30 or 40 years, architecture and the city. It gives voice to a unique so impressive in terms of its agility of thought. As Boyarsky using modern technology. It is this group of practitioners across a broad range of Asian points out, this is led by Ti-Nan Chi’s notion of micro- technology that has formed a background to cities who are actively redefining the Asian the appearance of shameless spatial environment in their own terms. Western architectural tactics, where small-scale interventions become the most compositions and functional combinations, perceptions of Asia have in recent years been unthinkable in the traditional European city. monopolised by two contradictory but interdependent potent, and Kazuo Shinohara’s ‘readiness to learn from So what is this city of Tokyo, which can allow factors: the rush of mainstream corporate Western such unthinkable productions? How have we architects to enter a huge emerging market and the the city’, which becomes ‘a mandate for the architect managed to arrive at such a different place rush of avant-garde Dutch architects and theorists to to act in the city as citizen rather than master planner’. from that of European modernity despite the appropriate perceived cultural and environmental availability of the same building technology? difference. These two forms of neo-imperialism, the These are all modes of practice that pose strong … Shamelessness can become useful, so let shamanism of density and the mammon of capital, us start by considering that these shameless have successfully rendered Asia both a passive paradigms for global urban planning and design, as buildings are not collapsible into the concept exemplar for innumerable student projects and a they urge us to look and listen and level ourselves, as of ‘chaos’ but are in fact an intricate willing victim to crass commercial architecture. reporting of the concrete urban situation. Rem Koolhaas’s ubiquitous and relentless city dwellers, before attempting to encroach or impose. — Yoshiharu Tsukamoto1 intellectual drive to normalise and Europeanise, or 4 5 more succinctly codify so much raw phenomena tactics – the stuff of Asian cities – become the key Urban Flashes that has linked Asian architects with from new emerging worlds, has been an other criteria in this developing consciousness. There those in the Western world, such as the Italian group opportunistic but nonetheless pioneering global are here perhaps closer connections to Western Stalker; Casagrande & Rintala in Finland; the Bergen enterprise (see, for example, The Great Leap anthropological thought, in particular to the work of School led by Svein Hatloy in Norway; our own ‘Action Forward 2 for a Koolhaasian judgement on Asian Mary Douglas on purity, pollution and taboo;4 to the Research’ work and scatter planning typologies; urbanisation, or the recent May 2003 Wired Surrealists’ interest in the primitive and to the ‘base Peter Lang’s work on Superstudio and American ‘KoolWorld’ for his more recent take on real materialism’ of Georges Bataille than to mainstream suburbia; and the work of Austrian architect, film- virtuality).3 Curiously, his coordinated efforts to architectural traditions. maker and artist Karl-Heinz Klopf, amongst others. understand the entirety of the human physical Considering much of the literature in the field, This group continues to grow and respond to Chi’s condition have by consequence succeeded in Bernard Rudofsky’s 1965 publication and exhibition concept of plasmic growth finding reinforcement excluding precisely that which he most hopes to ‘Architecture without Architects’5 was a step in the right throughout the world. Notes engage and comprehend. Asia is repeatedly cast direction,